Welcome to another Trash Talking Friday, the only trash talk that wears the same pair of jeans for weeks and still makes them look and smell fresh! Each week, I send you Ideas to ponder about. Ideas that have the potential to change your life, and hopefully help you become a better human being by understanding yourself.
This week I talk about:
- The cause of plastic pollution.
- Corporate hypocrisy
Let‘s get into it!
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Using A Band-Aid to fix a broken Dam: Plastic Pollution & Corporate Hypocrisy
To start off here are some mind-boggling figures that some of you may be aware of, while others may be oblivious too. Facts about how mismanaged post-consumer plastic waste, cosmetics, washing clothes & keeping the tap open to ever increasing production of virgin plastic have created a herculean man-made problem that we call plastic pollution.
Facts:
1. Every minute the equivalent of 1 truck of plastic waste is dumped in our oceans
2. Plastic has been found in more than 60% of seabirds and 100% of turtles
3. By 2050 nearly every sea bird species will be eating plastic
4. 11 Million tons of plastic as per latest reports make their way to our oceans
5. 150 million tons of plastic is currently in circulating in our oceans
6. Plastic production & consumption is expected to double over the next 10 years
7. More Than 5 trillion pieces of plastic are floating in the ocean as of today
8. Packaging material is the largest market for plastic, accounting for nearly half the plastic waste generated globally
9. 73% of beach litter is plastic, with food packaging wrappers now taking the top spot from cigarette butts as the most littered items
10. Fishing nets abounded accounts for 10% of all plastic in our oceans
Here is another fact that you don‘t get to hear too often:
No amount of beach clean ups, ocean clean ups, plogging or segregation of waste will solve the problem unless steps are taken to first drastically reduce & over a short period of time stop the production of virgin plastic.
While billions of dollars and millions of man hours are being spent on cleaning up our beaches and oceans, mismanaged plastic waste continues to make its way to landfills, street corners, drains, rivers and oceans at rates that far exceed what any clean up can achieve.
This is something that we all wished would happen to our bank account. Imagine all it did was grow exponentially every day, no matter how much you spent. Unfortunately, this is not our bank account, but something much more important than that. Something that, once taken from us will be next to impossible to replace no matter how much money we throw at it. Something that we all share and is a vital part of our existence, in fact it is the reason we are able to exist as a species on planet earth. If you have not figured out what this something is, go out and take deep breath, take your kids to the park, go for a swim in the ocean, visit a wildlife sanctuary or simply close your eyes and imagine the last time you were with nature.
I am not saying that that you should not partake in such activities, or that companies should not invest in finding solutions to rid our oceans of plastic present in them. Rather, these activities should be treated like a desert after the main course. Why? Well because we need to start treating the cause and not the symptoms.
The Cause of Plastic Pollution
Increasing amount of Virgin production: Global production of plastic has soured from 25 million tons in 1970 to over 400 million tons in the year 2018. This number is expected to double by the year 2030! Petrochemical companies including Reliance industries & and the Indian Oil company are investing heavily to set up petrochemical refineries to manufacture and flood the markets with ever increasing amounts of virgin plastic. Unless this bleeding is not stopped, mopping the blood-soaked floor is simply a cosmetic exercise. This requires increased consumer awareness through civil activism and shareholder activism, both of which are negligent in our country.
Design & Material selection: Packaging material is now the largest market for plastic manufacturers. Brands such as Coca Cola, Unilever, P&G, Mars, Nestle, Danone, Mondelez, Colgate Palmolive are amongst the top polluters. This year has bought more disturbing news, with multi layered plastic packaging overtaking cigarette butts as the most polluting item of litter found on beaches. It‘s imperative that at the development & design stage special consideration be given to material selection to ensure that the packaging is recyclable using conventional tried and tested mechanical recycling technologies available in the market as of today.
The definition of recycling: Many of us think that recycling simply means taking a plastic item and converting it into a new item through a mechanical process. The truth is that most of the plastic is downcycled. Recycling in essence means, take a product and through a mechanical or chemical process creating the same product again, to be used for the same purpose that it was first manufactured for. For example, a PET mineral water bottle once recycled should be converted into a PET mineral bottle again to package water. As of now PET is mostly downcycled into fiber used to make clothing, which then ends up in the landfill once it reaches it end of life. This is what we call elongated linear consumption, where the original product is given a different from to elongate the pain and propagate a false sense of doing the right thing. True recycling is always circular, such as in the case of metals, or converting organic waste into compost, or the extraction of precious metals from E-waste, Lithium, cobalt and other materials from lithium ion batteries. For plastic, we need a similar system in place, but first we need the above three points to be implemented along with investing in infrastructure from collection to processing.
Infrastructure: The entire world needs to invest heavily in waste management infrastructure, from collection to processing of not just plastic waste but also many other types of waste such as organics, textile and E-waste. But let‘s stick to plastic for now. Globally there are many loop holes in the waste management system, take for example what the west has been doing for decades, by asking its citizens to segregate their waste and then shipping it to Asian and South East Asian countries including India for processing. In essence they have been lying to their own population, and this structure of cards came crumbling down with China imposing strict restrictions on importing waste into its borders. Since then many countries such as Indonesia, Thailand and India have imposed their own bans on Imported waste. Majority of these countries including India were struggling to manage their own waste and the influx of foreign garbage has been a tipping point of sorts. The reason the west has been shipping waste to Asia is because it‘s cheaper for the to do so than to invest and set up infrastructure to manage it within their own borders. You may find their streets clean and garbage collection organized, but that does not mean it‘s being managed properly, much of it also ends up in landfills, incinerators and on foreign shores. There is also a massive increase in the instances of Fly tipping (illegal dumping) in countries like the UK, US and whole host more across the western world.
Asian countries such as India find themselves in a precarious position. There is lack of infrastructure on all sides from collection to processing. The fact that there are two parallel systems operating (organized and the unorganized) add to the complexities. Though the unorganized sector is greatly responsible for collection, recovery and processing of plastic waste in India, it hardly solves the problem. Unregulated, unorganized collection, segregation, dumping and processing is a major cause of plastic pollution in the country. Remote areas of the country, small towns and hill stations are in the dark ages when it comes to waste management infrastructure, with urban areas having a slight edge. There is need to start managing waste on land where its generated through planned investments in the entire life cycle from collection to processing.
Distraction:
Beach clean ups, plogging, ocean clean up, segregation, recycling, introduction of new materials such as bio-plastic, new technologies such as chemical (Advanced) recycling are all distractions too by time and influence policy by polluting brands, oil, gas and petrochemical companies. Simply put, it‘s against their interest to move towards circular consumption as this would adversely hamper their finances. For brands, proclaiming their sustainability commitments, where is the transparence and traceability? Proclaiming their love for all that‘s green through far reaching media campaigns is another way to distract and green wash consumers. Here are a few examples of corporate greenwashing:
Natural All Bottle Alliance: Nestle, Danone and Pepsi are all part of this initiative which is working to make 100% bio based, recyclable beverage-based bottles from natural materials. The companies have neither committed to any time frame not have they reported any progress since 2018.
The Ocean Clean Up: The majority of the plastic in the ocean is below the surface and already fragmented. This system, through advertising on social media and popular platforms like TED has managed to siphon off not only the public‘s attention from viable solutions but also vast amounts of money. The project has industry partners such as Danone, petrochemical giant SABIC, industrial plastic manufactured Agru, all of which are heavily invested in plastic production.
Alliance to End Plastic Waste: Fancy name not so fancy intentions. This alliance was started in 2019 and has a total of 47 members predominately oil and gas companies, chemical and plastic manufacturers, consumer goods companies, retailers and waste management companies. The Alliance has pledged $1.5 billion to tackle the plastic pollution problem over the next 5 years. This may seem impressive at the face of it, but according to a recent damming report the cap is blown of this bottle. The very same companies that are supporting this alliance have invested $186 billion in setting up new petrochemical facilities between 2010 and 2017 to facilitate the production of plastic. The American Chemistry council reports that the US alone is investing $202 billion to set up 340 new projects, adding 28 million tons of plastic production capacity within this decade.
Here in India, reliance continues to be the largest petrochemical company in the country and the largest polyester yarn production company in the world. 18% of all plastic produced is used for polyester production. Not to be left behind is Indian Oil Company, which is investing close to $2 billion to set up a petrochemical facility in Odisha, with a production capacity of 800,000 tons per annum to facilitate the textile sector. This when the government owns 51.5% of the company and is aggressively advertising the ban on single use plastic and propagating a clean pollution free India through its flag ship project of Swachh Bharat Abhiyan.
These distractions are meant to have another purpose, that of shifting the onus of the plastic pollution problem onto the consumer by repeatedly telling them not to litter and too segregate and assist in recycling. It‘s evidentially clear that just because you segregate your waste it does not mean it‘s recycled. It‘s also very clear that just because its collected does not mean its processed. If companies continue to produce packaging that‘s non-recyclable, no amount of segregation is going to help.
Further, if the disposed of waste has zero commercial value it will not be recovered by the unorganized or organized sector. Since these materials cannot be recycled, most of them will be dumped in landfills, incinerated and a lot of it will enter our oceans through our rivers. If the system for collection of waste is nonexistent or broken as is the case in many parts of the country, citizens will have no option but to dispose their waste in open drains or empty tracks of land. If garbage collectors who come to collect your waste, mix it all up after you put in the effort to segregate, what‘s the point? If the system of processing plastic waste is broken, unorganized and severely deficient in its capacity to deal with the current volumes, what hope is there for the future where demand and production is most likely to increase incrementally?
The problem is on land and must be solved on land, not by landfilling or incinerating, but by making brands and producers legally and financially responsibly to first ensure that they don‘t produce any packaging that cannot be recycled using existing mechanical technologies, reduce drastically the production of virgin plastic at a rapid pace with stringent timelines in place and facilitate and finance proper waste management systems from collection to processing not only in the developing or under developed world, but also in the countries of their origin. Moving the blame, first to consumers and then to the developing nations as a reason for plastic pollution, while continuing to invest in production of virgin plastic and shipping waste across oceans is a game plan that now stands exposed.
As a nation, we need to start asking tough questions both of our government and businesses, through public forums, filing PIL, RTI‘s, asking questions in shareholders meetings, on social media platforms, on social media pages of large and small brands etc. From a government perspective there is lot to be desired on the policy front, just demanding that consumers segregate and not litter is passing the buck due to your own incompetence‘s that stem from poor regulation/enforcement and ill planned policies that fail to hold the real polluters accountable for their action both legally and financially.
We live in a world full of hypocrisy, hell I will be the first one to say that I have caught my self being one numerous times, specially when I have had an audience, hence I tend to stick to my lane now and speak about only what I know, but more Importantly what I practise and or endeavour to change through action. Everything is not what it seems to be and as consumers we must make the effort to proactively lift the veil of corporate and government hypocrisy, for its making a fool of you while charging you money for it.
Until we meet again next week, have a fabulously sustainable weekend!